Past Sitting Beside You

We might order you too.
Screen shot from Lufia & The Fortress of Doom (SNES, 1993). I know I’d like fries with that.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but it keeps coming up. I’m moving forward, but since I’ve moved back to where I grew up, the past has been saying ‘hello’ at odd times and scaring the ever living CRAP out of me.

It then leaks into my subconscious and leaves a weird residue. I have weird dreams. I think about it too much. I get a strong urge to move (and I hate moving and rather like my place).

On one hand, being here is perfect. I have studio space. I have a place to live. My family is nearby. I have a nice yard.

On the other, it’s perfectly wrong for me. Memories live next door. I’m having a hard time finding a job that fits and isn’t ‘just another job’, but is something like the beginning of a career. I don’t know a lot of people I have deep relationships with nearby. There are a few (and I love you guys), but I feel like I’m still to far from them. They are an forty-five minute drive away. I really got to love being able to walk to everyone and everything. I’m back to being super inactive with little appetite. Then there is my family being nearby not always a good thing. Their problems become my problems.

I have issues with the general attitudes of people here. Yes, it’s a generalization, but I got used to people being friendly.

One of the first things that happened to me when I got here is that I got followed home by some woman in her car who screamed at me because somewhere I supposedly cut her off. She wanted me to get out of the car. I felt like I was on an episode of Law & Order or part of tomorrows news. I remember there was a news story years back about a person in MA who was shot with a crossbow and killed after being followed by someone with road rage. I figured I’d be safe in my truck as long as she didn’t have a gun or crossbow.

I feel like this is some psychological thing I should be able to break. I’m not in high school, but this is where I was when I was in high school. I spent a lot of my time a couple of streets over. I built up a new identity in college and post college. I’m someone who was a lot more confident, outgoing, and happy. Sure, I’ve kept the cynical half-smile and sarcasm, but I’ve grown up. Just by being here, I’m identifying with parts of my past that, though they are irrelevant, are managing to psych me out.

So, I build new memories of this place.

I am somehow simultaneously living and avoiding here. I interview for jobs outside of Boston, I take classes in the same area, and I hang out with friends up there too. I stay in my apartment when I’m here. There’s not a ton to do here in the middle of winter with little money, but there are things.

I live here. This is where I came from. I don’t hate this place, but I almost feel like it hates me. The people and attitudes I am trying to avoid are the ones with the issues. I need to stop owning that.

If Rory Blyth can deal with past living next door, well then so can I. Granted, this is no Portland, Oregon, but there are things to like, do, and people. I just need to gather up the gumption to go find them.

I need to put aside the girl that lived here so I can get on with being the woman that lives here.

Recovery

a studio mouseTwo months after living in a tent and communal ceramics studio, it didn’t take me all that long to get used to sleeping indoors and in a bed again. When people ask me about what happened, starting off with a “…so, I hear it was pretty ridiculous down there,” I reply with, “Yeah, but it’s water under the bridge now.”

Is it? I’ve been berating myself for not getting as much done as I used to: looking for a job, taking classes, building a studio, and selling work. I feel guilty for giving myself a bit of a break- traveling, spending time with friends and family. I also haven’t been doing much talking about my experience in Virginia.

If you know me, you would think that I’ve been thinking about it a lot, obsessing even. I’m avoiding thinking about it. I have been downplaying it to everyone because I needed to downplay it to myself to deal with it bit by bit, an sometimes, not at all.

I somehow don’t feel like I’m allowed to be hurt by that experience. There are people down there still living in tents and at least making a little bit of art- and they somehow deal with it. Don’t they?

Out of six, one lives in a nice apartment nearby.

Two is from Virginia and has family and a boyfriend that she can visit anytime (and talk to at length). Every time things got really bad down there, she was gone in her car for a weekend that had a habit of turning into a week.

Three is not from Virginia and doesn’t have family there. However, he spent about half the time I was in Virginia traveling. Sometimes he’d leave to go up north without telling anyone.

Four came to ‘look at the place to consider it and be considered for a residency’ with a dufflebag containing all his worldly possessions. He came on a bus, walked the rest of the way, and stayed.

Five came burnt out making production ceramics and with baggage he hopes to unload through drinking and burning things. When I left he still had not even tried to make the one idea he’d been talking excitedly about since I got there. He has built a tee pee and adopted an abandoned puppy.

Six has been there a long time. He’s a passive aggressive mask living in the kiln shed on a couch where he watches the Simpsons on dvd, smokes, drinks, eats, and leaves the communal dishes.

These people, as far as I know, are still there and getting by. So I feel like I can’t act like it was such a bad experience if people are still there and surviving. But then I remember what it was like. People are getting by at the post-college club for wayward kids who may be ambitious and want to make art. For the ones that do want to be serious artists, it’s a fight against those who just want to feel as good as they can doing whatever. More than living in a tent, that was the real issue that made living there hard. I blamed the tent because I thought that if there was a quiet room somewhere to relieve my stress, I could deal with the struggle in the “mentally and creatively rich studio environment (ha)”. It was hostile, tense, immature, and lawless most of the time. One of the residents, I think it was Three, called it Lord of the Flies. That’s the easiest and most accurate way I’ve ever heard it described.

The reason I left was a sudden lack of income. It was also a final breach of trust. Most things I was told while I was there, I believed. Most things I was told were said to me to put me off and make me: go down there, deal with it for another little while, wait for it to get better, and just wait because you have so much invested. I even paid for three months of rent on the studio and then left because the news on my lack of income was at the same time as when rent was due.

Living in a place where you can’t trust that people aren’t deceiving you, eating your food, taking your things, breaking your things, talking about you, going to yell at you, and invading what little space and privacy you do have is not living. It’s surviving.

I survived, but I’m not myself. This past summer in Maine I lived in a space I didn’t feel safe or welcome in. I held in there and saved money, pinched pennies, to go to another place that was supposed to be better, yet was somehow worse. I didn’t feel like myself at the end of the summer. I’m just starting to feel like myself again. I don’t know that I’m ready to think or talk about it much in any real way. I can put people off with jokes about the south versus the north (and how some people think that Virginia isn’t even really the south). Silly tid-bits come easily enough.

Not being myself means I’m not working like I used to. I know that in me, I have the ability to finish up my novel. I know I have the ability to get my studio together faster and get some work made. I know I could have a near perfect score in the it course I’m taking. I know I could have more posts and more site updates. I could have a few more web programming languages under my belt. I could be looking for that perfect job more aggressively.

Would any of that help if I’m not myself? Working harder isn’t going to help me concentrate on doing a better job. I feel like everything I’ve done since I’ve got back has been sub-par. I see the bar that I normally meet or exceed and stare at it. I don’t know why I’m not up there. I tell myself I’m lazy. I am starting to realize that is an easier answer compared to admitting that I took a big blow these past several months. I let things not just get to me, but actually push me down.

I’m going to get up. The sooner I can admit these things and sort through them, the sooner I can be me again. Regardless, I think it’s going to take me some time. I’m relearning how to live and strive again rather than just survive.